Jill Stelfox is Executive Chair and CEO of Panzura, leading hybrid multi-cloud data management software/services for the enterprise market.
Data is everywhere. It’s the fuel that powers the engine of business, regardless of industry or sector. Our reliance on data has skyrocketed in recent years, and that’s not a bad thing. It helps make us more efficient, allows us to make forecasts and predictions, and is the foundation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Data underscores every aspect of business, and it deserves to be protected.
The sheer volume and distribution of data that businesses are dealing with can seem overwhelming. There is sensitive information, regulated data, unregulated data, outward-facing data, customer data—the list goes on. That leads to concerns about security such as data lifecycles, encryption, access and much more.
But how do businesses protect what they can’t see? Without comprehensive data visibility, securing data is akin to patching a leaking ship while discovering more holes in the hull.
According to Veritas, the average enterprise stores 10 petabytes of data, and 15% of a company’s stored data is considered business-critical, while 52% remains “dark” or unclassified. What’s more, 63% of respondents in a 2022 survey claimed that they lacked visibility into the location of data within their enterprise.
Data visibility is a superpower.
Data is so heavily distributed in today’s digital environment that it could be everywhere or nowhere at once. It lives on edge devices, remote servers, cloud applications—you name it. In the days of USB drives and hard disks, it was relatively easy to locate data and keep it locked down, but that data storage solution doesn’t fly in an age where we’re overwhelmed with data and where convenience, flexibility and innovation rule.
In today’s sprawling digital environment, data visibility has become a genuine challenge for businesses, but mastering it can give them access to superpowers that enable them to scale, grow and compete with the best players in their industry—superpowers like the ability to better understand project timelines, make better decisions and gain high-level insights into budgets, resources and staffing.
Data visibility is also the foundation of good data security. Having a complete picture of data assets at every single server or endpoint can allow businesses to lock down sensitive data faster, uncover vulnerabilities before they become a problem and regain control over how data security measures are designed and implemented.
Data security has evolved.
It goes without saying that data security is more important today than at any other point in a relatively short digital history. As businesses evolve and expand their data footprint, and as threats continue to grow in sophistication, data security needs to work harder to keep up. A typical robust data security strategy should factor in physical hardware, such as server infrastructure, as well as software, cloud-based applications and access controls.
Employee awareness and training also play a key part, as well as leveraging steps such as “least privilege” (where employees are only able to access the data they need to carry out their work) or multi-factor authentication (MFA) to verify users. These security best practices have been the gold standard for years, but at a time when businesses are embracing hybrid, multi-cloud environments, is that enough?
Security cannot afford to be a mere function—it needs to be a strategy. There are four high-level strategies that can be adopted to ensure good data hygiene and security: encryption, erasure, masking and resiliency.
• Data Encryption: Encryption scrambles data into an unreadable format requiring a key to unlock. This isn’t new, but there are modern applications of encryption that leverage algorithms to make the encryption process faster and more secure, using tokenization to allow encrypted data to move through a company’s technology stack without compromising the security of the file in question.
• Data Erasure: The majority of data businesses collect has a lifecycle, and when data such as old customer records are no longer useful, they must be disposed of in a secure way to prevent any liability for loss in the event of a data breach.
• Data Masking: This refers to the ability to conceal personally identifiable information in data records so that that data can be handled by those with a lower security clearance or used in staff training exercises. Data masking goes hand-in-hand with encryption, but rather than encrypting the entire file and making it useless to those without access to the key, masking only hides sensitive elements so that files can still be handled in context.
• Data Resiliency: This refers to a company’s “bounce-backability”—using backup protocols and off-site duplication to ensure that data can be recovered seamlessly in the event of a crisis without compromising its integrity. This is particularly important when it comes to guarding against threats such as ransomware, which has become all too prevalent in today’s digital landscape.
None of these elements work in silos—they must be implemented as part of a holistic security strategy with big-picture controls in place. Data needs to be discovered, classified and organized so that the right security controls can be deployed. Files need to be actively monitored so that anomalous behaviors can be detected and investigated, and regular assessments need to be carried out to assess vulnerabilities such as unpatched software or exposed data access points.
The future of cloud data storage may be distributed, decentralized and unstructured, but that doesn’t mean businesses can’t keep their data safe if they employ the right security strategies. Security needs to evolve in lockstep with other technologies—that’s the key to making the world a safer place for data.
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